New Year Back Up Bulletin

Your business’s data is probably the most valuable asset your company has. It can, at best, cost time and money to recreate and, at worst, lost data cannot be recreated resulting in partial or total loss of valuable business information and inability to continue day to day operations.

Obviously taking a backup is only the first stage, but who is responsible for ensuring and checking that the backup has been successful? The importance of this cannot be underestimated and should be assigned to a responsible employee of the business.

Protecting and backing up your data should be viewed as a critical investment. If nothing else, ask yourself one question; how much is the data worth and what is the cost to your business if data is lost?

The four main reasons for data loss are: hardware failures, software errors, human actions and natural disasters. Whilst hardware is quite reliable, failures happen and more often than not cannot be predicted or prevented. Software errors are easier to predict and therefore prevent but are not failsafe. Human mistakes are much more common and data can be lost easily by a simple mistake by a user without any malicious intent. Natural disasters, whilst rare, can happen, and usually result in a total site loss. Even if you have regular backups, if they are all on one site a natural disaster could result in total loss of both your live data and backups. Industry practice is to follow a 3-2-1 rule: – 3 sets of data in 2 different media types, with 1 offsite.

Are your backups offsite?

It is vital to ensure your data is not only backed up, but also replicated offsite, to ensure you are covered for any potential disaster.

Atlas Business Group have a fully secured data centre situated in a former nuclear bunker, located in Cheshire. We have several solutions available from backing up your data to our secure data centre to hosting your entire IT estate.

Do you regularly test your backups?

Whilst it is essential to ensure your data is backed up and replicated offline, testing the integrity of the backed up data is equally as important. Many businesses fail to test the data until it is too late.

Whether you have a simple backup solution or a full disaster recovery / business continuity solution, testing is of paramount importance.

We at Atlas can help by carrying out periodic restoration tests into a virtual environment scheduled at your convenience.

If the answer to any of the above questions is ‘NO’, one of our experienced Engineers will be more than happy to discuss your current situation with you and offer a solution that can be tailored to the individual requirements of your business.